The Beautiful Puritan Pansies: Glanvill, Mather, Franklin, Beethoven, Cusa, Toscanelli, Columbus

Edgar Allan Poe's Virgil was to a degree Joseph Glanvill. The title alone of his work "Scepsis scientifica: or, Confest Ignorance the way to science" fairly leaps off the page for any who have read Nicolas of Cusa's Of Learned Ignorance.

It is of no little moment then, that Cotton Mather's whose Essays To Do Good literally were the inspiration of none other than the subject Beethoven's Ode to Joy "Gotterfunken" Benjamin Franklin!

For it was Cusa and Toscanelli that enabled Christopher Columbus to set off for this "New World." And remarkably, the Massachusetts Charter is in this sense an offshoot of that same spirit of learned ignorance. One has but to begin to read Mather's American Bible to comprehend the profound impact of the quest for scientific progress inherent in the purpose of the Revolution.